Forms are utilized by many websites to register members or to sell products. Users who visit a website generally view the process of completing forms as being time consuming, and users may abandon the process for a variety of reasons that are difficult for website operators to discern. For website operators, abandonment by users means missed registration or missed sales.
Several methods for improving the process of completing web-based forms are known in the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,981,028 describes a system whereby a user's personal information is stored in a central database and may be accessed by a membership website. Registration forms associated with opening a new membership or account may be completed automatically from the stored personal information. The system may be adapted to recognize that information that has not been recorded is needed for a new registration and to prompt the user for the needed information. The automated form completion feature is not limited to registration forms and may be adapted to access recorded user data to complete virtually any type of form a user is likely to encounter.
U.S. Patent Publication 2005/0198120 provides a method of integrating multiple web sites that provide services, such that users accessing a host web site are presented with content from the multiple service sites. The content from the multiple service sites is determined by marking web pages from the server sites with tags indicating the content within each page that is to be presented. A host web page presents the content from the server sites and determines the manner in which the content is presented.